W. H. Auden, who was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907, is one of the most successful and well-known poets of the 20th century. Educated at Oxford, Auden served in the Spanish Civil War, which greatly influenced his work. He also taught in public schools in Scotland and England during the 1930s. It was during this time that he rose to public fame with such works as "Paid on Both Sides" and "The Orators." Auden eventually immigrated to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1946. It was in the U.S. that he met his longtime partner Chester Kallman. Stylistically, Auden was known for his incomparable technique and his linguistic innovations. The term Audenesque became an adjective… to describe the contemporary sounding speech reflected in his poems. Auden's numerous awards included a Bollingen Prize in Poetry, A National Book Award for "The Shield of Achilles," a National Medal for Literature from the National Book Committee, and a Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Numerous volumes of his poetry remain available today, including "About the House" and "City Without Walls." W.H. Auden died on September 28, 1973 in Vienna.
Born in Belfast and raised in Carrickfergus, MacNeice was the son of an Anglican clergyman who became a bishop. His education in English schools and Oxford University made him ill at ease with his Puritan upbringing, but it never caused him to lose his sense of northern Irish roots. At Oxford, MacNeice became friends with Stephen Spender and later, W. H. Auden, with whom he collaborated on "Letters from Iceland" (1937). After graduating with a double first, MacNeice accepted a lectureship in the classics at Birmingham University and, after the traumatic elopement of his first wife, at Bedford College of the University of London. He joined the BBC as scriptwriter and producer in 1941 and… remained with it for the remainder of his career. He also did an admired translation of Aeschylus's "Agamemnon" and the well-known book "The Poetry of W. B. Yeats" (1941). MacNeice defended his own poetry and that of Auden, Spender, and C. Day Lewis in his book "Modern Poetry" (1938). There he called for an "impure poetry" that would react against the giants of the previous generation by embracing the partisanship that he missed in W. B. Yeats and involvement with life that he found lacking in T. S. Eliot, both of whom had otherwise influenced him. While engaged with personal and political issues of the 1930's, MacNeice maintained a more skeptical stance than many of his contemporaries. His best verse---such as "Valediction" or "Bagpipe Music"---brings wit and strong rhythms to bear on contemporary life and often harks back to scenes of his youth. After joining the BBC, he also wrote more than 150 scripts, of which a dozen radio dramas have been published. An autobiography, "The Strings Are False," was published posthumously in 1966. During his lifetime, MacNeice was overshadowed by Auden, but in recent years, reevaluation of his work has regarded him as a major literary figure.